Sudbury River restoration poised for next steps

Nearly three decades after Nyanza was added to the national list of Superfund cleanup sites, the Sudbury River still has a long way to go in its recovery from years of contamination by the former Ashland dye plant.

But that restoration effort is hitting a few important milestones in 2012, as national and state agencies unveil long-awaited plans to undo the damage.

Nearly three decades after Nyanza was added to the national list of Superfund cleanup sites, the Sudbury River still has a long way to go in its recovery from years of contamination by the former Ashland dye plant.

But that restoration effort is hitting a few important milestones in 2012, as national and state agencies unveil long-awaited plans to undo the damage.

Last week, a trustee council composed of various environmental government bodies released a list of 11 projects aimed at restoring and protecting the river and surrounding watershed, as well as improving public access.

Later this fall, the federal Environmental Protection Agency will release a draft design plan for the remediation method for the river chosen in 2010. The updated proposal, which involves laying down a sand cap in the most contaminated reservoir, the No. 2 in Framingham, is unchanged, but includes more detailed information collected by the agency the past couple years, said EPA project manager Daniel Keefe.

While their efforts are administratively independent of each other, both the trustee council and EPA have said their plans will complement each other in the common goal of restoring the river and its wildlife habitats, which decades of testing have shown to have elevated levels of mercury.

The main source of that pollution, Nyanza, which closed in 1978, nearly 60 years after the manufacturing plant was built, agreed in 1998 to a $3 million settlement - now $3.7 million with interest - that will pay for the trustee council's projects, which will get going within the next few years.

The EPA's remediation, meanwhile, is still in need of funding, according to Keefe, who said it could be a while until it gets that money due to a glut of other federal cleanup projects around the country.

While state and federal officials lauded the restoration projects announced last week, it's unlikely they will completely undo the decades of environmental damage to the river and surrounding watershed, said Molly Sperduto of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Compared to a more isolated incident like an ocean oil spill, Nyanza's prolonged dumping had far-reaching implications that even subsequent ecological risk assessments have not been able to completely quantify.

"You don't have people going out and counting dead animals," said Sperduto, a representative of the trustee council, who added the EPA's tests in the early '90s and in 2008 found elevated mercury levels in some species but did not reveal any significant changes in populations. "But there is the assumption that there was harm (done)."

Several of the proposed restoration projects involve revitalizing native habitats along the river to encourage species that were affected, including migratory waterfowl and fish, to flourish again.

The EPA's remediation faces similar challenges, chief among them the reality that even after the cleanup people could still be taking some risk by eating fish from the river - currently the only real human health threat stemming from the contamination identified by the agency, according to Keefe.

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"There's an overarching issue of mercury in water bodies across New England," he said, not just in the Sudbury River.

The EPA's goal, achieved primarily through the sand cap, which is intended to bury the existing mercury layer, is to eliminate the added contamination risk created by Nyanza's dumping, he said. While the agency's particular method was not popular with some Framingham residents living around the reservoir, who wanted the reservoir to be dredged instead, Keefe said it was the only approach approved by the EPA.

"A lot of improvement can be realized by the capping," he said, adding the agency has done "unprecedented" levels of testing along the river to prepare for the project.

The trustee council's plan, too, will at least "compensate for," if not totally reverse, the mercury contamination in the river and watershed, Sperduto said. Individual components of that plan to purchase land along the river and convert hundreds of acres around the Framingham reservoirs into a wildlife preserve will expand or replace impacted habitats, for example.

Other proposals to add water access points and build new visitor features at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury are intended to bring more people to the river, which, according to the EPA, poses no health risk apart from the consumption of fish from its waters.

"We're very excited," Sperduto said. "It's nice to finally be able to tell people about good things that are happening."

The council's full plan is available online at www.mass.gov/dep/cleanup/sites/nrd/nrdny.htm.

The EPA's draft cleanup plan should be released sometime later this month to early October, Keefe said.

(Scott O'Connell can be reached at 508-626-4449 or soconnell@wickedlocal.com)